verb

By a donnish performance, more in the style of a school of philosophy than of an economics department, Letwin proved the case for tax cuts, then forged an intellectual alibi for funking its implementation.

The attempt then to portray Al Gore, who rejected the subterfuge, as the one who was funking national debates was farcical.

It was interesting to see how Hollywood coped with this theme, and how director Sydney Pollack tiptoed towards reality but funked it in the end.

Origin

People started using funk and funky in musical contexts during the 1950s: before that, funky was a black English expression that meant ‘worthless, bad’, which reversed its meaning in the same way as bad and wicked to mean ‘excellent’. In the early 17th century, though, funk meant ‘a musty smell’. It may come from French dialect funkier ‘blow smoke on’, which was based on Latin fumus ‘smoke’ (the root of fumigate). Funk meaning ‘a state of panic or anxiety’ was Oxford University slang in the mid 18th century, in the phrase in a blue funk. It could refer to the slang sense of funk as ‘tobacco smoke’, or it could be from an old Flemish word fonck, ‘disturbance, agitation’.

There are 2 main definitions of funk in English:

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noun

1 [mass noun] A style of popular dance music of US black origin, based on elements of blues and soul and having a strong rhythm that typically accentuates the first beat in the bar:a mixture of punk and funk [as modifier]:a funk bass line

Origin

People started using funk and funky in musical contexts during the 1950s: before that, funky was a black English expression that meant ‘worthless, bad’, which reversed its meaning in the same way as bad and wicked to mean ‘excellent’. In the early 17th century, though, funk meant ‘a musty smell’. It may come from French dialect funkier ‘blow smoke on’, which was based on Latin fumus ‘smoke’ (the root of fumigate). Funk meaning ‘a state of panic or anxiety’ was Oxford University slang in the mid 18th century, in the phrase in a blue funk. It could refer to the slang sense of funk as ‘tobacco smoke’, or it could be from an old Flemish word fonck, ‘disturbance, agitation’.